Seagate ST1 1-Inch Hard Disk Drive Review

Today we would like to introduce to you a new one-inch hard disk drive from Seagate supporting CompactFlash interface. Based on the regular HDD architecture (featuring platters and heads), this product proved very fast, very reliable and robust against external physical vibrations and shock. And the most important is that it offers outstanding storage capacity at a very affordable price.

Table of Contents

Seagate Company undertook a detailed investigation and analysis of the perspectives and trends of the memory market, and they decided they should no longer disregard tremendous opportunities that exist out there.

Of course, they considered that designing a compact storage device supporting CompactFlash standard and based on the hard disk drive architecture would be a great idea, since Seagate is one of the leaders in hard disk drives development nowadays. This decision logically led to introduction of the new product line among Seagate’s products, called ST1. Today we are going to introduce to you one of these products.

Please welcome Seagate ST1 ST650211CF 5GB!

Closer Look

Before they actually released a new product into the market, Seagate not only carried out detailed market research, which revealed the increasing interest towards compact storage devices. They also had to take into account and solve a number of technical issues, which arose inevitably during the product development stage.

Of course, they had to make sure that miniature hard drives meet all the specific requirements for higher performance, because they would definitely be used in such devices as MP3 players, digital cameras, pocket PCs and other small portable solutions, which usually suffer a lot of physical vibrations and shock during use and transportation. The storage capacity of these drives had to be competitive with other analogous solutions available in the today’s market, such as Microdrive solutions from Hitachi. And of course, the newcomer from Seagate had to offer even better performance than the rivals to become a success.

Now let’s take a closer look at this product to see what Seagate actually managed to create. The ST1 hard disk drive family is currently represented by 2.5GB and 5GB models designed for CompactFlash interface. The latter solution mentioned above boasts the biggest storage capacity among all today’s 1” solutions of the kind. I would also like to stress that 5GB storage capacity allows this drive to compete very successfully with CompactFlash memory cards, where you will hardly find too many solutions with the capacity exceeding 4GB. Besides, the memory cards like that are still more expensive than the miniature hard disk drives. One of the major distinguishing features of this hard drive is unexpectedly large cache buffer, which is 2MB big. This is a typical cache-buffer for many regular 3.5” HDDs. The drive takes about 2sec maximum to boot and get ready for work, while the average noise level doesn’t go beyond 2 bel.

Higher reliability and stable performance in tough working conditions (in case of extra physical vibrations affecting the drive) are achieved due to Seagate’s brand name RunOn technology. This technology allows to detect inappropriate harmonic frequencies and to compensate them by automatically forcing the heads to stay on the tracks. It is also important to prevent the drive from failing in case of an unexpected external shock, such as when the device falls down on the floor, for instance, because in this case the heads can hit against the platter surface really hard and thus damage the surface. In order to ensure this will not happen, Seagate implemented their G-Force Protection technology in these ST1 drives, too. The idea behind this technology is that the heads get automatically removed from the platter surface once the HDD is shut down, which reduces the risk of accidental damage to the minimum.

The hard disk drive weighs 19g and features the following dimensions: 42.8mm x 36.4mm x 5mm. The approximate price of this solution is $300.